Top Performance Tuning Experts have years of hard earned experience. They’ve worked on thousands of performance problems , acquiring in depth knowledge of SQL Server and the whole performance stack.

I’ve observed these top 5 habits of Performance Tuning Experts

Servers

Learn everything about servers . You should have an in-depth experience of configuring Windows, SQL server , Service Broker, Caching Tier. Database Size, transactions per second and concurrent users are continuously changing . If you don’t know how to understand and manipulate the components in-between a client request and the code, you are very limited in your ability to troubleshoot and improve performance

I work with SQL server and DB2. In my opinion, IBM DB2 has great documentation but the SQL Server community is much better developed. There is some serious expertise on various forums and through conferences.

SQL Server default configurations since SQL Server 2005 are very good. But , different access and usage patterns can require configuration changes.

Focus on bottlenecks – become effective

Don’t optimize on ghost issues. Don’t just blindly optimize. The “Kill it by Iron” approach is popular , as hardware becomes cheaper. Before upgrading hardware gather metrics and understand the bottlenecks. Understand the bottlenecks – fix them and move onto the next bottleneck. Repeat……